Okay, Okay, let’s skip the lawyer jokes. Your legal department is a key component of a fantastic company that runs smoothly and efficiently. Sure, each department of your company is its own system with its part to play, but there is a certain danger in considering the borders between departments as clear-cut and impenetrable. As a startup grows from a skeleton crew and duct tape to a larger more corporate affair, the need for a legal team starts to become apparent. If you approach your legal team as a separate entity from your other departments, you risk poor communication and slower and worse outcomes. In reality, legal is your best asset for many of your other teams to work together and create better solutions. So what does good and bad collaboration look like?
How departments interact with Legal
Contracts and fair relationships
If your legal team and sales team are fighting one another, what does that say about the future of your business? Your legal team is there to work alongside your other departments, ensuring that the red tape is clear and risk is mitigated. A strong relationship between sales and legal can take many forms, but the most essential element is successful communication on both ends. When it comes to contracts, a legal team is essential for ensuring that everything is fair and negotiations are targeted and necessary. A sales team cannot function properly if they are wasting time on useless negotiations and unfair business relationships. Practically, what this means is that your sales team and the legal team must have a well-communicated working relationship and chain of operations so that contracts and any other legal materials can be flagged, sent, and sorted in a timely manner. The most important element of this is ensuring that the contracts are fair and determining what negotiations are essential and what are unnecessary.
Financial risk mitigation
Finance and legal can sometimes seem like they are at odds with one another, but a strong legal team is crucial to help mitigate financial risk. You should utilize your legal and finance teams as a joint force to mitigate risk within your company, creating a clear and efficient dialogue between them.
Copyrighting
For your marketing department, copyrighting can be a stressful issue. It’s fairly obvious that copyrighting and trademarking alike come with legal hurdles. Copyrighting is a cornerstone of effective branding and having a legal presence is a key element to avoiding any risks that might jeopardize that.
Compliance issues
Each of your departments is made up of incredible people that work to make your business what it is. Collaboration between your departments can ensure that a standard is met across the entirety of your company. With any compliance issues that arise, reinforcing your team with legal advice aids in a smooth and quick resolution process, allowing all of your departments to run in the best environment possible.
What makes bad legal collaboration
an adversarial approach to negotiation
Your teams are not competitors they are partners working towards a common goal or against a common enemy. If either party approaches collaboration in an adversarial manner, you risk the success of your efforts. Negotiation, especially in sales, is a common necessity and sometimes a challenging issue. If your team’s approach is one of hostility, it’s likely that the outcome is not going to be as favorable as it could be.
Poor communication
Wait, when did you send that? Bad legal communication takes many forms such as lost emails, not being clear in your statements, not raising an issue soon enough, or shutting down effective communication when it is presented to you. Bad communication also takes the form of mixing up tasks and not knowing who is the right person to go to. Collaboration does not mean a complete dissolution of department boundaries.
What makes good legal collaboration
Win-win partnerships mindset
Good collaboration starts with a good mindset. A win-win partnership is a great standard for approaching each task between departments. This means maintaining a high level of communication and respect between members of each department but this also applies to interactions with other companies. When legal is approached with an issue regarding another company, the goal should be to find a strategy that results in a win on all sides, therefore, maintaining a friendly and successful partnership dynamic.
Clear Communication
Don’t mince your words or get lost in an abyss of emails. Prioritize clear, concise, and effective communication with the right people. This also means timely communication! Don’t raise an issue at the last minute and leave your legal team to scramble!
Clear task boundaries
Speaking of the right people, establishing clear boundaries between roles and assigning tasks allows for better communication and a smoother overall process. When you have a key person in legal to raise an issue to, and a direct line of who to delegate tasks to, solving problems becomes a hell of a lot easier than chucking an issue to a general department.
Takeaway
Your legal team is an essential part of making your business run smoothly. When you have clear boundaries, effective communication, and the right mindset, legal can be the best friend to a variety of other departments.